Dealing with autotools

Manoj Srivastava srivasta at acm.org
Tue May 12 05:24:32 UTC 2009


On Mon, May 11 2009, martin f krafft wrote:

> also sprach James Westby <jw+debian at jameswestby.net> [2009.05.10.1523 +0200]:
>> With current practices there is effectively a "Debian upstream" branch
>> from the VCS, which contains thes history of the tarballs that made up
>> the source packages.
>> 
>> Even when building from a VCS it is possible, and I would say 
>> encouraged, to maintain this branch.
>
> I've never done so, and I've never understood the need, but in the
> light of the autotools discussion, it's starting to dawn on me.
>
> Is this a separate branch with one commit per unpacked tarball, or
> is this a branch which gets upstream merged and then the tarball
> imported, such that the diff of that commit would effectively add
> all the changes and files introduced in the act of 'make dist' or
> 'make tarball'?

        This is the point of pristine-tar. For every upstream release,
 there is one commit  each into the upstream and pristine-tar brnaches;
 together, these commits allow one to recreate, bit for bit, the
 upstream tarball, so the  user may check any crypto checksums upstream
 provides.

        My build process looks for a orig,tar.gz file, and if that is
 missing, can create it from pristine-tar and upstream branches.

        Now, these branches contain every bit that came from
 upstream. My  integration branch, however, does not contain any file
 autogenerated by gcc, flex, bison -- or  autotools. The clean target,
 in fact, removes all the autogenerated files. Usually, topic--debian
 contains a commit that removes these files.

        manoj
-- 
What the large print giveth, the small print taketh away.
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta at acm.org> <http://www.golden-gryphon.com/>  
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